Cherish
Cherie Vasil, also known as Cherish, is the wayward daughter of Nikos Vasil, the eldest sister of Jean-Paul "Alec" Vasil and Darlene Vasil, and a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Personality Like her brother, Jean-Paul, Cherie is intelligent and lacks emotional capacity almost to the point of being a sociopath. Raised in an environment of hedonism and exploitation, she was allowed to indulge in any vice she desired from a young age.Look at it this way - at the age that many boys are raising an eyebrow at boobs, family members were saying 'hey, here are all the boobs you could want, in various shapes, sizes, and colors'. Interested in dick? Big ones, little ones, crooked ones. Dad's not that into it but a sister can hook you up. At an age when many are just figuring out enough of the world to ask 'what's heroin?' or 'what's weed?' he was given heroin and weed and everything else that was theoretically obtainable and told to only indulge if it was someone else's body. At an age when many are saying 'sex must be awesome' he was given free reign. Where other 12-13 year old boys might search the internet for weird and disturbing porn and kinky stuff just to see what's out there, he could experience it. He was given all of this in a context where people either didn't care or they didn't/couldn't judge (or, considering obligatory big brothers and their teasing, judgment didn't count for a hell of a lot compared to novelty.) - Alec's past prior to joining the Undersiders (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2017-05-03) Unlike her brother she revels in both the exploitation and use of her abilities, wanting to forge her own path she descended into becoming a serial killer. Relationships Heartbreaker Cherie thinks of her father as unfocused and petty, losing all respect for him after he attempted to add a movie star to his harem and endangered the Heartbroken while doing it. She was desperate enough to escape his attentions that she joined the Slaughterhouse Nine. Jean-Paul "Alec" Vasil Not much is known of their relationship prior to Jean-Paul running away from home, but they had previously been made to practice their powers on each other by Heartbreaker. In the present day, Cherie shows no qualms with attempting to kill her brother via turning his minions on him. She sees him as somewhat responsible for Heartbreaker's behavior after Alec ran away, and nominates him for the Nine as "payback". Appearance Cherie is a slim, conventionally attractive young woman with dark hair with a red streak running through it.Interlude 11g During the Slaughterhouse Nine's tests, Mannequin had her tattoo her stomach and chest with gigantic, hideous raised tattoos that distorted her body and distracted from her natural beauty. When Jack Slash could think of nothing more to be done during his test he had her go through the other tests again leading her to getting a matching tattoo across her back. Abilities and Powers Cherish has the ability to both detect and control emotions. She interprets emotions as a form of "music" that comes from the mind and body of her target with each different emotion having a different "sound",He went for his gun, but he didn’t get that far. She closed her eyes for a moment, listened for the music that came from his mind and body. The jangling, dissonant noise of alarm, the throbbing percussion of mortal fear, every part of his body shifting into fight or flight mode. The underlying notes spoke to his personality. His love of his family, his fear that he was about to leave them behind, anger towards her, a momentary anxiety that he was overreacting. She grasped this in the fraction of a second. Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it. When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges. ... Not much time to do it. She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia. Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear. “Get the gun.” He fished for it between the seats, picked it up. Then he pointed the gun at her. “No, stop,” she said. Too unspecific. Fuck. Still need to work on that. She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her. Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain. She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions. By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely. - Excerpt from Interlude 11g making it easy for her to track her targets. While her power did not have natural long term effects, she could theoretically build up a dependency within a target.What Alec didn’t know was that her power did have long-term effects. Subtle, but they were there. Emotions were like drugs. People formed dependencies and tendencies. If she hit someone with a minute amount of dopamine every time they saw her, it would condition them until she didn’t even need to use her power to do it. Just a little while longer, she told herself, and I’ll have the Nine wrapped around my little finger. - Excerpt from Interlude 11g Presumably this is how she can get a crowd of boys to act as her personal entourage when she was shopping. Cherish has displayed the ability to detect people's emotions from across the entire city, both allowing her to track them and allowing her to detect their relationships with each other. She can also deduce capes based on their greater emotional volatility. She is able to tell who people are based on the emotional signature she gets from her powers.He nodded dumbly and climbed out of the jeep. She made her way over to the driver’s seat, then waited for him to climb in before she peeled out. The jeep cut through the shallow water that covered the roads. Others had noticed her leaving, she knew, and were following in their own vehicle. She could sense them, each a fingerprint of emotions in deeply individual configurations. The mix of personal pride and confidence that she sensed in them suggested they were military. The soldiers that had been taking over for this guy? ... She reached out and started feeling for the outliers. The emotional fingerprints that stood out from the rest. The other seven members of the Nine were out there. Not hard to find. One or two were interacting with some other outliers. The most fucked up people in this fucked up city. She’d studied each of these unknown outliers over the course of a week, watching their emotions shift as they went out about their lives, sometimes visiting the areas they tended to hang around, to get a sense of their environments. Slowly, she’d pieced them together, created profiles, discerned which ones had powers and described them to the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Each had made their picks: The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader. And all she wanted was a few minutes to pay a visit to hers. She didn’t have to name that one. He was familiar enough. She smiled. - Excerpt from Interlude 11g When close enough, she can induce emotional states in her targets at will.Cherish pointed out in the Regent/Cherish interlude that her advantage over her dad is a huge detection range and the ability to use her power if she can’t see her target. The drawback being that the effects are short lived (and even shorter lived as her targets build up an immunity). Then again, she could be lying about it. �� - Comment by Wildbow on Prey 14.3 A side benefit of her powers was that she could pick up languages easily, since she could already intuit the meaning behind the words.“Oh, it’s simple. Going by what I’ve been able to observe around the city, there seems to be a major concern. Si Jack effugit civitatem, mundus terminabitur.”jack escapes the city; the world ends “I’m not versed in Latin,” Coil spoke, sounding annoyed. “For shame, Coil, for shame,” Cherish said. Her voice was too cheerful. “You can’t sell the cultured supervillain image without the ability to make quips in an ancient language. I had the benefit of my power, languages are easier to learn when you can get a sense of what the other person’s feeling.” - Excerpt from Prey 14.9 She speaks Latin, and presumably speaks French as a native of Quebec. Power interactions As a human based Master she was resistant to, and interfered with, similar Masters. Regent's control over people kept her from forcing his puppets to hurt themselves, while her ability to emotionally overload people effectively made them useless to him. He himself was highly resistant, if not outright immune to her, given a lifetime of exposure. On a similar level a Master like Gallant would confuse her emotional topology, Cherish would be immune to the emotional aspect of his blasts but not the concussive aspect of them. Further, his blasts could dispel her emotional manipulation, one way or the other.Having emotion manipulation usually appends a degree of emotion manipulation resistance. They'd probably both be pretty darn resistant to one another. That would include Gallant fuzzing Cherish's emotion map. His blast could theoretically knock her on her ass but wouldn't do much more than that (and against those she was controlling, would probably dash whatever effects were present to the winds, or sufficiently confuse/paralyze them to stop whatever Cherish had them doing). When I say 'pretty darn resistant', I'd really say that the 80-100% resistance they had would veer one way or the other depending on how in concert they were with their passenger at the time of the encounter. - Comment by WildBow on Reddit Glory Girl's aura might have a similar effect on Cherish's Thinker senses.Maybe he's interested in her because he can't get a perfect read on her - comment on the IRC Archived on SpacebattlesDarchiasq: It's not breaking SoD that Gallant is a bud off Glory Girl, but it seems very unlikely. I think Gallant has been a cape too long for that to be possible. Another big argument for Aegis being a Cauldron cape is that his powers majorly changed his physiology, which is a telltale sign of being one. However, I don't think it's unlikely that he could be an Eden natural trigger, like Leet and String Theory. Andrew Greaves: It occurred to me, belatedly, that something like the reverse might be possible. We know that Glory Girl is a second generation Cape, and the origins of her force field power are rather obvious. But what about her empathic aura? Where did that come from? It's well known that second Triggers involve polling any other Shards within range and such, but does this also happen with first Triggers? Could Gallant have already been a cape and nearby when she Triggered? Of course, she could have also second Triggered with him nearby at some point. Incidentally, as a second gen, I'd surmise that her second Trigger would be psychologically comparable to a first gen's first Trigger. Wildbow: You're thinking along the right lines, re: the source of her aura, Andrew. - Comment by Wildbow Interestingly her powers make her an effective counter to Stranger-type infiltrators like Satyr, who is able to change his form but not his mind. Cherish isn't able to see or hear Imp, but she was able to sense her emotions.Interlude 13.5 (Donation Bonus) History Background Cherie Vasil was born in Montreal, Canada to Nikos Vasil and one of his "wives". At some point, she triggered and took part in the wider family business of exploitation.It took thirty minutes before the first hit registered. A traffic camera, a busload of young women. A row of identical faces, looking out the window. An unusual element, raising flags with the active programs. The faces took center stage as they were checked against a database. An image popped up: surveillance camera footage of a teenage girl in a shopping mall, followed by young men that each carried loads of packages. Eyebrows, brow to hairline length, nose length, eye width… The words popped up. Cherie Vasil. - Excerpt from 26.x (Donation Interlude; Saint) Eventually she grew tired of her father's short sightedness and decided to run away in order to escape her father. Her father sent two of her brothers after her who chased her, until she decided to join the Slaughterhouse Nine. Nominating herself to fill a vacancy in the Slaughterhouse Nine's ranks, Cherish ambushed Hatchet Face, killing him. After this, Cherish had to go through seven tests from the remaining members to join the Slaughterhouse Nine. Crawler, not feeling Cherish was even worth his time, took the murder of Hatchet Face as his test completed in advance. Bonesaw infected her with a parasite which nullified her powers for forty-eight hours, the effects of which would become permanent unless she drank "lots of blood" - but Bonesaw didn't tell her how much blood was needed, nor if blood from animals would work. Siberian did her usual test, and chased her for three days and three nights (starting on the second day of Bonesaw's parasite), biting off a finger joint each time she was caught until time was up. Five minutes after Siberian's test ended, Shatterbird stuck Cherish in a blacked out room with a shard of glass pursuing her for an undisclosed period of time. Burnscar test is not known; Burnscar generally requires potential members to face their greatest fear, but what that meant for Cherish is unknown. Cherish failed that test, but it's also unknown what the penalty for failure was. Mannequin ordered her to get a massive, hideous tattoo that would degrade her in other's eyes.Jack laughed, “Ah, adding to the challenge? Fair. She killed Hatchet Face. Crawler took that as his test completed in advance, didn’t think of her as worth his time. Little Bonesaw, for her test, designed a parasite that would stay in her system for forty-eight hours and strip her of her powers for as long as it remained.” “Because it’s not fair that Hatchet Face didn’t get to give his test. And I wanted to break her out of her rut, so I made it so the parasite’s effects would be permanent if she didn’t drink lots of blood.” “Of course,” Jack tapped the heel of his hand against his forehead, “That was an interesting little twist. Of course, you didn’t tell her how much she needed to drink, or if a certain species counted… Well. It broke her stride, didn’t it? Siberian went after her, starting on day two of Bonesaw’s parasitic infection. Three days and three nights of cat and mouse. To her credit, she did very well. It came down to a hair. Another ten minutes and Siberian might have caught her a third time.” A dark look passed over Cherish’s face. “Shatterbird likes the psychological tests, and she was in a hell of a mood after Cherish nominated herself for the team. Our Cherie didn’t have five minutes to rest before Shatterbird drove her into a room and sealed her in. No food, no light, barely any water. The room was empty, but for one glass shard. Always edging towards her, ready to prick, cut, slice and stab the second she stopped, the moment she tried to rest.” ... “Burnscar’s test, she failed. Afraid I’m not spoiling that one. Doesn’t have the same impact if you know it’s coming. That left only two tests for her to pass. ... Mannequin demands that a candidate changes themselves, and that it be hard. Having just faced the punishment Burnscar gave for failing her test, Cherish wasn’t about to pay his.” ... “Oh, I knew it would be almost impossible to top Mannequin’s test. He caught her at the exact right moment, struck the right nerve, and pushed her to her very limits. Still, I think I managed to top it. ... I made her do the other six tests all over again.” - Excerpt from Plague 12.4 When she finally got to Jack Slash's test, he was slightly upset that she was already broken, so his test was to go through the other tests all over again. Bonesaw even revived Hatchet Face for it, and Cherish was forced to kill him again, this time without the advantage of surprise.Plague 12.4 Post-Leviathan Cherish was used by the Nine to locate potential members upon arriving at Brockton Bay. After a less then cordial reunion with her brother she accompanied Jack when they had an impromptu meeting with the Undersiders and the Travelers. Her machinations to subvert and control the Nine were revealed by Tattletale and leaving Cherish fearful for her life. When the Slaughterhouse Nine disposed of the Merchants, Jack did nothing to assuage her of her fears, though he implied that she could earn a reprieve. When Cherish discovered an anonymous stranger amongst the Nine she tried to cut a deal.Interlude 13.5 (Donation Bonus) After she was captured by The Undersiders, Cherish was held by Coil on an abandoned boat in the Boat Graveyard and interrogated. She later got in touch with Jack, telling him her location and that he was destined to destroy the world. As they left, the remaining members of the Nine visited her prison, taking their revenge for her treachery. Bonesaw modified her to only sense negative emotions and removed her filters. They then placed her in a prison of Mannequin's design, throwing her into the bay,Prey 14.11 she rested in the Boat Graveyard.Cherish (Imprisoned) – Regent’s sister, has the ability to manipulate emotions and sense emotions in a distinct enough way to track and identify individuals at a distance. Attempted to use her power in a subtle fashion on the rest of the group, only to find that they knew what she was planning. Following the escapades in Brockton Bay, she was trapped in an impervious, life-sustaining shell of Mannequin’s design and sunk to the bottom of the derelict Boat Graveyard, where she is expected to live for several thousand (or tens of thousands of) years. - Cast Page (In-Depth) Post-Slaughterhouse Nine Being locked into a state she felt and could influence negative emotions she caused havoc in a small area around the docks. This was brought up in the mayoral debates.That’s not getting into the cost of actually refurbishing the area and updating it to modern standards. Or the fact that anyone approaching within a mile and a half of the area is subjected to uncontrollable, suicidal despair. - Excerpt from Monarch 16.8 Danny told Taylor that the zone she was creating was getting in the way of the Dock workers' projects.“''Taylor'',” my dad spoke. “Hi dad,” I said. “''How’s the work?” “It’s not,” I said. “I got a call from someone I’ve been working with on and off, and stopped by the school. Where are you?” “''The boat graveyard. We’re trying to do some problem solving, and it’s slowing us down. Which school?” - Excerpt from Chrysalis 20.3This is Cherish. - Comment by Wildbow on Chrysalis 20.3 Cherish was later used in the battle against Butcher.Cherish was placed in a perpetual-life sarcophagus and dropped to the bottom of the bay, in the boat graveyard. In the mayoral debates, they remark on the ambient aura of suicidal depression that was hitting anyone who ventured into that area - Cherish's power working without targets or limiters. Butcher was lured into that area. - Another Comment by Wildbow on reddit The villain was lured into her range, and thanks to the multiple voices inside his head, Butcher was more influenced by her power, committing suicide. Butcher's powers then presumably transferred to her. She was then transported deeper in the ocean where she could contemplate her predicament,Cherish was dragged away from the harbor and let to sink to a point that was pretty deep in, in partial hopes that she would be far enough away from any living beings that the Butcher wouldn't jump to a new host. - Comment by Wildbow on reddit likely for a very long time.She’s hooked up to the same systems that keep Mannequin going. Chances are strong she’ll live for a few thousand years. Maybe ten or twenty thousand, depending on the degree of wear from tides. - Comment by Wildbow on Chrysalis 20.3 Post-Timeskip Nine Cherish clones were created as a part of the Slaughterhouse 9000. One is killed by Golem and his allies at the start of the event.Sting 26.2 Seven are killed by Dragon, - Excerpt from 26.x (Donation Interlude; Saint) and the ninth was offed by Weaver.Sting 26.6 Gold Morning Cherish may have died when the Eastern Seaboard on North America was destroyed.Interlude 26 However, no nearby capes are recorded as inheriting Butcher's powers, so she could have survived. On the other hand, she is not mentioned later in the Gold Morning, despite having an extremely useful power. Fanart Gallery Slaughterhouse Nine by Scarfgirl.jpg 6 - Cherish.jpg|Image by Abyranss on Reddit Cherish by Superwhitey.png|Fanart by Superwhiteys on Tumblr Site Navigation Category:Characters Category:Females Category:Villains Category:Master Category:Slaughterhouse Nine Category:Heartbroken Category:Point of View Character Category:Vasil Family Category:Unknown Status Category:Worm Characters